In today's data-reliant world, having a strong IT system and infrastructure is an important part to any business' success. Likewise, IT is one of the first things that needs to be accounted for in any business continuity plan.

The success of a business continuity plan hinges on reducing any downtime that occurs as the result of a disaster. Having secure and responsive IT systems is often the first step in ensuring a company gets back up and running quickly and effectively. 

Here are five tips for creating data backup plans:

• Know your options. There are many ways to backup data. Having onsite data backups can work in a pinch, like external hard drives or servers, but they are susceptible to the same disasters situations that can affect the rest of your company. Other, cloud-based or off-site storage backups will keep your data secure and out of the way of any threats to the rest of your business.
• Use both. Don't settle for just one. Using both on-site and off-site backups can help ensure that your data is always available when you need it.
• Backup responsibly. Often times, it may be more efficient and cost effective not to backup everything. Perform an audit of your data. Know what is absolutely necessary for critical functionality and then work backwards from there. 
• Develop a standardized filing and naming system. Much like it was with the filing cabinets of yore, filing conventions can vary wildly person to person. Creating one unified system will help create efficiencies and more easily identity files necessary for backups. 
• Automate. Ever forget to save something you're working on and realize you lost hours of work? Imagine that but on a company wide scale. Having an automated backup system will help streamline the process and ensure that everything is safe and secure.

For more information on how to properly create data backups, contact a business continuity consultant today.